In honor of the end of Harry Potter, and subsequently the end of my childhood, I present life lessons learned from my 13 year relationship with HP books and movies.

Spoilers ahead for those who’ve not finished the movies and/or books

Number 1:

Your abusive guardian(s) may serve some purpose after all besides making your life a living hell.

For example:

Dumbledore didn’t just drop Harry off at the Dursely’s to help build his character.

Honestly there were better people to leave him with, friends, professors, even the Wesley family, (whom would have known the Potters’ from being in The Order of the Phoenix together).

Dumbledore left Harry with them because his mother died protecting him thus enacting a blood spell shared by presumably any maternal family left. So leaving Harry with Petunia sheltered him from being found and killed/harmed by Voldemort.

In the real world J.K. herself had what I would call an abusive dad who decided she was no longer good enough to talk to anymore.

So next time your parent or guardian does something horrible, just think, if you survive you might be able to write or do some other inspired work that can make you money and make you feel a whole lot better about your past plight.

Number 2

When an authority figure seems to hate you, there is always way more story than you will ever know.

There's serious pain in those eyes.

Example:

Severus Snape. Sure he doesn’t have the warmest, fluffiest feelings for Harry, but he goes undercover and stays there until the moment of his death because of his love for Lilly Potter. Because he loves Lilly so much, by proxy he both loves and resents Harry. He always goes out of his way to protect Harry, and even Harry’s friends.

This proves that you can never fully know someone, especially an older/adult authority or family figure. There are always secrets.

Number 3

Secrets are often times necessary, but if you keep too many you end up in isolation and sometimes giving the wrong impression.

Example:

Dumbledore, Snape, Petunia

Almost every character in the series keeps secrets to protect themselves, protect others, or keep some sense of self separate from people who love them.

Dumbledore does this with his brother and sister, and the truth of Harry being a horcrux. He goes so deep into keeping secrets that he cuts his brother off emotionally, and cause Harry to doubt him. The only purpose it serves to remind us and the characters that Dumbledore is human. Often times he comes off as a wise, ascended to higher consciousness being, but in the end he was a good man who made mistakes as a conflicted young man.

Petunia keeps the secret from everyone that she desperately wanted to be a witch. Her aversion to magic and the “freaks” is because of her jealously of Lilly. She bottled up her anger and pain to the point of where she believed she hated magic. Her secrets became her reality, cutting her off from a meaningful relationship with Lilly, and Harry.

Number 4

No matter how talentless and useless you may seem or feel, your moment will come.

BeforeAfter

Example: Neville Longbottom

Throughout the series, Neville is a good hearted, well-meaning friend and student. However, he is usually bad at everything, save herbology, is extremely clumsy, and kind of funny looking.

Throughout all the years of messing things up, being ignored or worse, mocked, Neville really came to his own in the last film and book.

First off, in movies he grows into a very handsome young man. So he has that on his side.

He also becomes an action hero, something previously thought impossible, (though I think there was an inkling when he helped fight off death eaters in Order of the Phoenix). He fights death eaters, stands up to Voldemort, and kills Nagini.

He doesn’t get to kill Bellatrix, but I give that one to Molly, Bella did after all kill her son.

Number 5

Death is not that big of the deal for those who’ve died. It is always worse for those left behind.

Example:

Everyone who has died with an intact soul.

Death is a huge issue for the living and the ghosts in Harry Potter. Just like for us muggles, death is fear because of its uncertainty. Will it hurt? What will happen? Will I still exist? Where will I go?

As Sir Nicholas says in the books, for those who fear it too much when it comes, they stay on the earthly plane, as ghosts, as cowards.

But for those who do accept their death and are okay and move onward, there is more. I would daresay a peace.

So as we are saying goodbye, we are the ones left behind to mourn the characters who’ve we have lost and the story that we wish could continue forever.

“”Do not pity the dead, Harry. Pity the living, and, above all, those who live without love.”- Albus Dumbledore

A patient comes to you explaining that they have trouble losing weight despite good diet and exercise. You look at them and say something to the effect of, “Yeah right, workout more.Yes the vast majority of people who complain of this are eating poorly and probably not taking the best care of themselves. They may be looking for an easy way out, maybe some medication that will make them thinner or say this as an excuse when their doctors get onto them. But sometimes there is a legitimate issue behind this and other symptoms, that when ignored lead to worse problems and prolonged issues that make the person fatter and more unhealthy.

A young person comes in with any issue such as fatigue, soreness, or hell, even heart issues and you write them off, “You’re young, you’re fine.”

Someone comes in with a complex issue that require lots of testing, when the cause isn’t found quickly, you decide they are a hypochondriac and no longer worth your time.

The only time a Doctor should give a sane person this look is if he's a 900 year old Time-Lord

You misdiagnose someone countless times. When they see a specialist and come back with a diagnoses like “Fibromyglia” or “CFS” you tell them that you never suggested that could be a possibility because you don’t believe it is a real disease/syndrome.

You decide to give a patient a medication they should be taking without properly explaining the side effects it may have when they ask. For example: I had a doctor tell me my migraines were caused by my birth control and suggested we immeaditly inject the Depo shot. When I asked her what the side effects were, she told me there were none and it was the best birth control out there and I would feel better right away. Here are the side effects. I suffered a good majority of them including weight gain. I’m not saying this is bad birth control, it is probably awesome for some women, but since I am chemically sensitive it would have been nice to know.

When there can be no cause found in blood test results for what your patient is experiencing you refer them to a psychologist and tell them it’s in their head.

You disregard Chiropractors as medical professionals. Good Chiropractors are amazing.

I don't care if they are Aliens bent on taking over the world. They=Awesome

You have no empathy. This is only okay if you a really good at your job and actually try and find out what is wrong with the person. An example, albeit fictional is Dr. Gregory House, who is often without empathy, but f-ing rocks at his job. I understand that as Doctor you often have to become detached, but there is a difference between detachment and cruelty.

He may be an ass, but he gets the job done.

I have nothing but the utmost respect for doctors. At one point I wanted to go to medical school and still hold a fascination for anything medical. I understand that there are hard decisions they have to make and everyone makes mistakes. I also understand that there are many people out there who try and shenanigans medication out of doctors. I’m sure that for some of the mistakes doctors make with illegitimate patients are direct results of asshole patients, (perhaps I will do a follow up from that side). However, I think like in any professions, some doctors are just jerks. They were jerks before they became doctors and continued being jerks after.

Being an adult sucks sometimes. I mean, I never want to have to go back to being a teenager with limited freedoms and raging hormones. But back then when the bill collectors called my mom handled them because she was the adult in charge. Even through college when I was still under her health insurance, she was the one to whom I would forward the collectors. But now they know. They know that I’m not a college student anymore. They know that I no longer have health insurance. They know I’m an adult responsible for all of my debt and medical bills. And they are mean.

This represents Adult Me Post-College

So here is a list of the top douchey things bill collectors have done to many people over the years.

Belittle you for not paying the debt. Sometimes when they call to collect and people explain that they don’t have the money at the time, collectors have been know to call people losers, lazy, stupid ect.

Threaten you if you don’t give them your card number or routing number over the phone. I recently when explaining that I would send a check payment in, had the lady threaten to contact my boss, and the payroll department to have my check garnished. Not only is this illegal but it is completely out of line.

Talk very slowly and loudly, and snobby to you to get their point across. Some people are incredibly stupid, yes. Sometimes their is bad reception. But when you can tell by their tone that they clearly think that you being poor=you being stupid.

Make fun of you for losing your job or being underemployed.

Calling you after you’ve already made a payment, and then yelling at you for not making a payment. This happens for one of two reasons:

The person doesn’t look at your account and see that you’ve already made a payment that month.

The person who said they put it in the system that you paid didn’t.

It may be on one person’s spread sheet or whatever that you paid and not on another’s.

The automated system hasn’t been updated.

This is their way of further intimidating you to get you to pay everything in full instead of in payments.

Remember never give your card number or routing number over the phone. Especially if you are needing to make small payments instead of the full amount. More than likely they will take out the full amount and possibly keep taking out even though the balance is paid. To learn what is legal and illegal for debt collectors to do go here.

You are extremely and morbidly and at deaths door obese and your young child is also on the way and you take them to get fast food. This is even douchey-er if:

You yell at them to finish all their food.

You ask if they want another meal once they are done.

You order an adult meal for them.

You order an extra large adult meal for them.

FAIL

2. You scream into the drive through intercom when asked for your order.

3. You whisper into the drive through intercom.

4. You have your music on while giving your drive-through order. IF your music is on, and especially if it is on loud it will hurt the ears of whoever is wearing the headset inside.

5. You order 100 tacos in the drive through at Jack in the Box or Taco Bell. NOT COOL.

6. You think you are ordering something healthy because it is grilled. No. Wait. That is just dumb. Nearly, if not everything is bad at fast food places, even the salad is packed with sugar. When I worked in a fast food place they grilled things in the same left over grease as the burgers. Sure, grilled is better, but that doesn’t mean the grilled sandwich is healthy.

7. Children. With their dirty hands, and ketchup smeared faces, and greasey little fingers. They lack hygiene and any care for other people whatsoever. Think about when they climb through those playground tunnels, pee in them, put their gross unwashed hands on the plastic, poop their pants filling the tunnels with dung bombs as they go. Parents can try as hard as they want. They can make their kids wash their face and hands and use sanitizer but those little monsters will still find ways to be gross and possibly adorable at the same time.

Everything that ever happens inside a playplace is weird and also gross.

WARNING: Under no circumstances should a child read this post or watch the YouTube Clips that Are Posted. If Horror Movies Are Not Your Thing, DO NOT READ.

I grew up watching horror movies far out of my age range. At 3 when my mother was preoccupied by a telephone call, I managed to watch most of Nightmare on Elm Street 3 on television before she noticed. At 5 my mother and father showed me Interview with a Vampire to try and end my extreme fear of vampires. They succeeded so much that I threw a fit when I turned 6 because I wanted to become a vampire and be five forever like Claudia. I also tried to do a book report on The Queen of the Damned in the 4rd grade horrifying my teacher at the time. At 8 or so, my grandma sat me down and made me watch Last House on the Left to scare me into never going into strange houses or buying pot from strangers, I’m not sure which one it was or if it was both. I saw the Halloween series at 9 and around age 10 I saw Texas Chainsaw Massacre plus it’s sequel and The Hills Have Eyes.

It was Texas Chainsaw Massacre that frightened me the most of all. From this I learned the following things:

People in rural Texas eat you.

People in Texas love chainsaws too much.

Never under any circumstances take a road trip that goes through Texas.

Meat hooks are just as terrifying as chainsaws.

The sound of old camera flashes is absolutely frightening.

Never under any circumstances find yourself at a dinner party with cannibalistic humans.

Never ever pick up a hitchhiker in Texas, and/or do not ever hitch hike in Texas.

You can learn all of these things too by watching the Trailer and Following Clip. These clips are just as mentally scarring as the full Movie, so if You do not want to watch, you do not have to.

Seeing the movie was not the only thing that scarred me for life and make me fear the state of Texas well into my adulthood. My parents had a sort of after show once we were done with the movie. They told me the now beloved story of how they hitch hiked back from Texas with walking pneumonia. Apparently they had moved to Texas before I was born to get better jobs and cheaper apartments. However, Texas was so weird for them that they decided after a very short time that they had to leave immediately. At the time they had pneumonia and only enough money for one bus ticket back home that my grandma had sent my mother. Not wanting to leave my father alone on the journey, my parents hitch hiked home meeting many strange character along the way.

For example: there was a scary man with a briefcase next to him and dog guarding it. The man seemed very protective of his briefcase and his dog was trained to attack anyone who got too close. My parents escaped the car at a gas station. Another man was nicknamed Lucky and had lost both arms and legs in Vietnam, and used a voice box to speak. His traveling companion would light cigarettes for Lucky and put his voice box to his throat so he could speak. The companion never spoke.

Like these guys, but less limbs and more frightening.

My mother said that after all of this, if she could go back in time she would leave my dad to fend for himself and take the bus home.

I think that story and showing me Texas Chainsaw at too young was my parents way of keeping me from experiencing their own Texas horror story.

Thanks Mom and Dad

I recently thought back on my feelings about Texas when a friend mentioned she might move there, my immediate response was:

You pick people out in line to mock. Be it for their clothing, weight, hairstyle or that they are wearing the shirt of a band you dislike. You then, not only make fun of them to your friends, but out loud to the person themselves. The insults are never very educated or creative. They are usually perpetrated by grown men, white guys, many with confederate flag tattoos or shirts with overbearing beer bellies and the stank of hoosier covering their bodies.

You get very drunk, go over your limit on an incredibly hot day, and puke on someone. I know that sometimes it is unavoidable to get sick all over someone in a crowd. But if you know you are going to a place that is going to be very hot, do not drink too much out of courtesy of everyone around you.

Alcohol +extreme heat=projectile vomiting.

You violently throw bottles at people in the crowd. It doesn’t matter if they are plastic, when whiplashed, they still leave welts.

You crowd surf too much in a small space completely packed with people and kick people in the head. One time while enjoying one of my favorite bands at an outdoor festival people were crowd surfing 20 at a time in a very packed, small space. So many people got injured that they were bleeding and three ambulances had to rush people to the hospital. If you are going to crowd surf know how to do it right, and try to injure the innocents standing under you.

You cheer and scream and woo and talk the whole time a song is going on so that others cannot even hear the musician or band playing.

You spend the whole time watching the concert through your phone or camera, while you record it.

If you are a skin head at a metal show. Metal has no place for you. It doesn’t make you more Metal to be racist.

If you feel like you’ve failed as a parent recently because you didn’t react correctly to something or you haven’t spent as much time with them as you’d like, or you feel guilty for something or another, just watch this video about a pageant mom who injects her eight year old daughter with botox.

Video from ABC News

While watching this I just had the comic Maria Bamford echoing in my head, “Baby look pretty now mommy?”

I think that being a pageant parent should be classified as a mental illness. There has to be some strange syndrome out there that these people fit into . Injecting your eight year old with Botox for her “wrinkles” is an obvious case of child abuse.

There are so many other extremes that pageant parents put their kids through such as: waxing, hair and eyebrow extensions, extreme diets, mental abuse, fake teeth, wigs, revealing outfits, and Odin knows what else. These children are constantly having their body images mind fucked, and are being set up for a lifetime of body dysphoria issues.

Has anyone ever heard of a show, Toddlers in Tiaras? TLC has been in a death nose dive for years showing us the most useless and embarrassing aspects of human beings. I’m not sure if their programming is to show us these horrifying people and what they do to each other, themselves, and their children, or if it is promoting it. On another creepy and disgusting level are the judges at these events. I’ve seen but snippets of this show and the people on the panel judging the sexiness or beauty of a child in a bikini is absolutely abominable. I feel all gross just thinking about it.

I know many pageant parents say that their children really want to do this and they are just supporting them. Honestly it seems more like the parents really want their kids to do this so they can vicariously live through them. Children are very open to suggestion, if mommy or daddy or guardian of some sort psyches them up enough, they will do it.

For example: I sometimes get very suggestive about dorky things like Buffy, Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Science Camp, theater, Harry Potter and so on with my step-son and eventually he’s on board.

You are the parent and you ultimately decide what you kid does or does not do, especially when they are at a young age. I think there are parents who look at their children as empty objects in movement that they can dress up and primp and do with what they want without thinking of the consequences of how it will affect their developing bodies and psychology.

1. The hostess/host is away from her post when you walk in, and being impatient, you seat yourself in any section that pleases you.

2. The hostess/host seats you and you dislike where you are sitting, (because it’s not a booth or not positioned the way another table is, etcetera), so instead of politely asking to be seated somewhere else, if possible, you wait until the host/hostess has walked away, and re-seat yourself anywhere you like.

3. You complain to the waiter/waitress that the past 2-6 times you have been there your food was terrible or messed up and that they better make your meal delicious, perfect, and enjoyable this time.

Why do people do this? If you know you do not like the restaurant or had some bad experiences there why why why do you continue going? Why do you hold all of the wait staff personally responsible?

If they say they can not, you try and force the grubby thing into their hands and insist that they do it because your child will not drink out of their cups.

I’m sorry, but if your children are super difficult, bratty, temper tantrum throwing a-holes, don’t take them out, especially if they are very young children.

5. You get up to leave and as you walk out, you “discretely” grab the tip money on the tables as you pass them.

6. You whip your colostomy bag out at the table, and possibly change it and leave the dirty one behind.

What is it with people being disgusting about their colostomy bags? Is it senility? You would think if the person is eating with others who are not senile, they would say something.

7. You leave a piece of inspirational writing in place of the tip. You aren’t be wise, nice or helping anyone. A nice note or something can make a day brightener, as long as there is a monitary tip to go with it.

23. You splatter water all over the bathroom by shaking your hands dry instead of using paper towels or the hand dryer.

24. You leave your small children with a worker while you leave the theater to do something else, or go off somewhere unknown.

If you are alone and you need to use the bathroom this is void.

25. You leave your small child alone in a theater to watch something else, or just leave for a while.

26. You buy or try to buy tickets for your teens under 17 for a rated R movie.

Look I know this rule is stupid. I think 16 year olds should be able to see as many death scenes or boobs as they want. But if you do this you can cost the cashier their job because it is against company policy and depending on the state illegal. Many people argue with the cashier and don’t understand after it is explained why it is illegal. Your kid can see the movie if you see it with them. It’s that simple.

27. You do not show an ID when asked for one. If you are older this should be a compliment, not an insult.

*Added by Friends and Commentors:

28. You come to the ticket drop, (where a worker tears your ticket and drops the one half into the box with the slot), and pretend as if you do not have your date’s ticket.

Sometime people lose things or misplace them from box office to ticket drop. Sometimes they pretend not to have it to be dicks, or “funny” as they call it. A good majority of the time they are just trying to get two people into a movie for the price of one, “Oh I lost her ticket,” or “They didn’t give me two tickets! I asked for two tickets!”

To sum up there are always dbags in public. Some of them are snobs who either never had to work in public service, or don’t remember what it was like. Some think that public service workers are akin to servants. Some are racist, sexist, homophobic ass holes. Some of you have witnessed these human beings in action. Others of you are these people or have committed some douche baggy crime in public. If anyone can add to this list, please do so, because I’m sure we can get to 50. People are mostly bastard coated bastards with bastard filling, (thank you writers of Scrubs).

I always love seeing articles about stay at home dads. I think more men should take this on. It seems to make them more creative and balance the karmic scale of things. This is a great example of an offbeat, creative, and humorous father. I think when you have kids you have to hold onto your sense of humor. Children are inherently selfish bi-polar little beings that can suck you dry and make you bitter and frustrated. On the flip side they can be so absolutely kind and adorable that it makes the shit moments count. At least that’s what your mind makes you think so you can deal with parenting. Being a parent is traumatizing and wonderful. Even if you don’t want to read the interview check out the post it notes pictured.